When he comes across a patient he does not like, Dr. Beckman asks, “This is someone I could not like, but do I want to not like them?” At that point, he is ready to make a conscious decision either to change his attitude or behavior or to seek a solution that protects patient care.
Insightfulness into the physician’s own history and family of origin is a cornerstone of the work being done by a number of physicians at the University of Rochester, including Dr. Beckman, an expert in physician-patient communication and the medical director for the Rochester Individual Practice Association (RIPA). For instance, was the hospitalist’s mother overly passive or his father an alcoholic?
Dr. Beckman addressed bias recently when he rewrote a chapter on difficult patients for a new edition of a behavioral medicine textbook.4 “One belief is that there are difficult patients; there is something about them that’s difficult,” says Dr. Beckman. “And in some cases that may be true. But what [investigators have now] recognized is that people who are difficult for one doctor [may] not [be] difficult for another doctor. And so it would appear that the variable is not the patient, but rather it’s the doctor.”
When this phenomenon was examined to a greater extent, “they tended to find that the type of person that the doctor doesn’t like, they’ve often seen before … usually in their family,” he explains.
Is Reflection the Answer?
Dr. Beckman believes it is the obligation of medical schools to help practitioners understand their own strengths and weaknesses, including their biases. He and a number of colleagues have just received a grant to study teaching the practice of such mindfulness to physicians. The study will investigate whether that education will ultimately affect a doctor’s cost of care. Essentially, Dr. Beckman says, it comes down to a question: Does knowing more about yourself change the way you practice?
At Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, N.Y., where Andrew Rudmann, MD, is chief of a hospital medicine division that includes 17 faculty members and 40 midlevel practitioners, physicians have not formally discussed having negative feelings toward their patients. But, “I think hospitalists would do well to reflect on their feelings about these issues,” says Dr. Rudmann, who is also associate director of the internal medicine residency program at Strong.
Reflection on what physicians bring to their medical encounters should take into account what Dr. Beckman calls “the three big pieces” of how humans work together in a medical encounter: “What is happening to the patient before the doctor walks into room, what is happening to the doctor before he walks into the room, and what happens in the room.” TH
Andrea Sattinger also writes about “vintage bugs” in this issue.
References
- Bertakis KD, Azari R. The impact of obesity on primary care visits. Obes Res. 2005 Sep;13(9):1615-1623.
- Robinson BE, Gjerdingen DK, Houge DR. Obesity: a move from traditional to more patient-oriented management. J Am Board Fam Pract. 1995 Mar-Apr;8(2):99-108.
- Cohen ML, Tanofsky-Kraff M, Young-Hyman D, et al. Weight and its relationship to adolescent perceptions of their providers (WRAP): a qualitative and quantitative assessment of teen weight-related preferences and concerns. J Adolesc Health. 2005;37:163.
- Beckman H. Difficult Patients. In: Feldman MD, Christensen JF, eds. Behavioral Medicine in Primary Care: A Practical Guide. New York: McGraw-Hill Medical; 2003:23-32.